Singly, unless it be the sea-serpent—for whose existence there is a large and ever-increasing body of evidence—there is no fish or aquatic mammal that has the least chance with him, but as a sword-fish and two killers were observed, on one occasion, to unite their efforts for his destruction, it is possible that the principle of combination may be sometimes more largely, and, perhaps, successfully employed. On the occasion in question it was certainly not successful. The sword-fish struck first, aiming for the heart, but, with a quick movement, the whale interposed his head, striking the weapon sideways, and then, rolling over and sinking himself beneath the aggressor, ere the latter had recovered from the shock of the impact, gaped upwards with distended jaws, which, closing like a scissors, on either side of the long, thin body, cut it completely in half. Meanwhile the two killers had dashed in on either flank, but sweeping suddenly, amidst cataracts of foam, his enormous tail into the air, the mighty cachalot delivered with it a blow that stretched one of them dead on the sea, and then turning like a mountain in the water, pursued the other, now flying for its life. Here against three lesser giants—the sword-fish alone was some sixteen feet long—the issue of the combat was soon decided, but how many mighty strokes must be delivered, how often, yet unavailingly, must the vast jaws open and the huge teeth tear and rend, before one of two well-matched cachalots has defeated the other. Not infrequently, the under jaw of sperm whales that have been harpooned is found wrenched and twisted out of the straight line—sometimes to a remarkable degree. Such injuries can only have been received in fighting, and they are a proof of the fury with which such combats are waged.
Himself a monster, the cachalot feeds on other monsters of the deep, as huge, almost, and still more monstrous-looking than himself. It has long been known that some parts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans are inhabited by cuttlefish of a size sufficient to make them at least an annoyance, if not an absolute danger, to man. Captain Cook, in his first voyage, fell in with the floating body of one of these creatures, which, judging from the parts that were brought home and placed in the Hunterian Museum in London, must have attained a length of at least six feet, measuring along the body to the tips of the tentacles. Another, a larger one, was sighted by the French voyager Peron off the coast of Tasmania. This is described as rolling over and over in the water, but whether alive or not, is not distinctly stated. It was, however, taken on board, and, on measurement, the arms, or tentacles, alone, were found to be seven feet in length. They were eight in number—the usual complement of the group to which this species belongs, and which is thence called octopus—and had the appearance of so many writhing and hideous-looking snakes.
Here, then, were ascertained facts, and if Nature could have been held back by the discreditings and head-shakings of learned professors, who piqued themselves on sobriety of judgment, these ample measurements would have remained the limit of her capacity, as far as cuttlefish were concerned. Here, indeed, in a parrot-beaked, sack-bodied cephalopod, with eight waving tentacles, seven feet long and as many inches in circumference at the base, we had a being—it might even be called a monster—quite capable of seizing, drowning, and even of afterwards devouring the most expert and stalwart of the Polynesian pearl-divers. What more was wanted? Why would people keep on talking about and even seeing cuttlefish of much greater size, by which discoveries professors themselves ran the risk of having, ultimately, to give their sanction to, or even to make, statements which, in spite of all their names and titles could do to make them look sober, would still smack a little of imaginative wildness? However, the thing continued—as, indeed, it had begun long before. Pliny—or was it Aristotle—had started it, by talking of tentacles thirty feet long, and thick in proportion; but Pliny, though a sort of professor himself, had lived so long ago that he need not be treated like one. Later, in the Middle Ages, came rumours of cuttlefishes that flung their vast sucker-armed feelers aloft amidst the rigging of ships, and overwhelmed them in the waves. But this, too, was pre-scientific, and though the accounts of the great kraken of the Norwegian seas belonged to the age in which scientific voyages had been made, and cuttlefish actually measured, yet these were so obviously fabulous that no sober-minded scientist, with a reputation for incredulity to maintain, need trouble himself about them.
It was in 1750 that Pontoppidan, a Danish writer, and for the last seventeen years of his life Bishop of Bergen, in Norway, first gave to the world his account of the kraken and sea-serpent, and it must be admitted that what he says of both of them—but especially of the former—is sufficient to justify many a head-shake, on the part of grave people. The kraken, according to the bishop, has a back which, when it rises from the sea-bottom, provides anyone who may be in the neighbourhood, with a comfortable island of about a mile and a half in circumference. For an island, accordingly, it is often, and very naturally, mistaken. It may be landed upon and walked over with ease and comfort, but has the disadvantage of sinking slowly and leaving one in the water, if anything of a disagreeable nature, such as the lighting of a fire or the digging of a hole, is instituted upon it. Upon provocation, moreover, or when the creature is hungry, a forest of vast, snake-like trees, being its enormous tentacles, rise from and wave over the supposed island, seizing and overwhelming any vessel that may be within their reach. As it sinks, too, a violent whirlpool is caused, owing to the displacement of the water consequent on the disappearance of so huge a body—in which whirlpool ships are sucked down. The waters, for miles about it, are discoloured with a turbid fluid—the well-known inky discharge of the cuttlefish—and shoals of fishes, that have been attracted by the monster’s musky smell, and have lost their way in the darkness, are received into its vasty maw.
Such was the kraken, and with such an example before one it is no wonder that the learned world continued to fight stubbornly against the admission of tentacles more than seven or eight feet long, and eight inches round at the base. However, they still went on growing, and have become, at last, more authentic, so that there is now little doubt that the cuttlefish, on which the great cachalot habitually feeds, are sometimes of a size sufficient to bear comparison with his own enormous bulk. That they ever equal it—at least in weight—I should certainly hesitate to affirm, but that there are mighty cephalopods, whose eight or ten arms are capable of clasping the huge barrel of a sperm-whale’s body, and must, therefore, be some thirty feet in length, appears to be settled by ocular demonstration. Mr. Bullen, to whose interesting work, The Cruise of the Cachalot, I am indebted for most of this chapter, was once looking over his ship’s side at midnight, when there arose in the midst of that broad and shining pathway which the full moon of the tropics flings down upon the sea, a very large cachalot struggling with and, as it soon appeared, devouring a squid, or cuttlefish, which Mr. Bullen distinctly says was almost as large as itself. The great arms of this eerie-looking creature were writhed about the whale’s vast head, almost, if not quite, the hugest part of him, and certainly so, when, as was constantly here the case, the jaws were distended. As for the head of the cuttlefish, Mr. Bullen, after a very careful examination of it through the night-glasses—and it must be remembered that there was the whale’s head beside it, to compare it with—came to the conclusion that it was, at least, as large as one of the ship’s pipes, holding 850 gallons, but probably a good deal larger. The eyes alone he estimated as at least a foot in diameter. Huge as was this cuttlefish, it had not the smallest chance in its struggle with the cachalot. True struggle, indeed, as between the two, there was none, for the whale was simply eating the cuttlefish, nor did he experience any difficulty in doing so.
Taking the softness of the cephalopoda into consideration, and comparing it with the hard, solid, block-like body of the whale, it is not easy to imagine that there would ever be a different result to a rencontre between the two. Still, this may be possible. By the mere doctrine of chances, it is very unlikely that the largest specimen of a creature but very seldom seen should represent the greatest size to which it ever attains. Eight great tentacles of, let us say, thirty feet long are, as we have seen, incapable of holding a large bull cachalot powerless in their embrace. But to what length may not those tentacles grow, and would a length of fifty, seventy, or eighty feet be sufficient to do so? Sixteen mighty cables—for arms like these would wind at least twice about their enemy—would make a net from which even the hugest whale might find it difficult to free himself, and even he might at last yield to that paralysing effect which the suckers of the cuttlefish are supposed to have upon their prey. Then, again, there are female cachalots as well as males, and these are but half the size of the latter. Upon them or the young, are the wrongs of the giant octopus ever avenged?
I have speculated, in face of the incident here alluded to, upon the possibility of a cuttlefish’s tentacles sometimes reaching thirty feet in length, but there seems to be better evidence—that of actual contact and measurement—of their sometimes being longer still. Whilst in the death agony the cachalot belches out the contents of his vast stomach, which consist, for the most part, of huge-sized fragments of such great cuttlefishes, which have been bitten off and swallowed whole. Mr. Bullen fished up and examined one of these fragments, which he found to be a piece of an arm about five feet square, having on it six or seven round sucking discs, of the size of saucers, armed on their outer circumference with large sharp hooks resembling a tiger’s claw. On a subsequent occasion, still larger fragments were observed, their size being taken to equal that of the ship’s hatch-house, which was eight feet long, with a breadth and height of six feet. What must have been the length of the entire tentacle, of which such blocks as these were the component parts? Since one of seven feet long measured only seven or eight inches round the base, the calculation is not difficult to make, but I will leave the making of it to someone else. If we suppose, however, that these gobbets represented portions of the expanded ends, only, of two greatly elongated tentacles, which the various species of decapods possess, over and above the other eight, this would make their entire length immense: since such expanded part bears but a small proportion to the tentacle as a whole, and is not much more than twice its narrower circumference.
Look at it in what way we will, the creature that was bitten into such fragments as these, must have been of proportions so vast that the Bishop Pontoppidan himself can hardly have erred more in overstatement, than our grudging scientists have, in under-estimation. Seven feet for an arm or a tentacle! That was enough—we were to be satisfied with that. But no, neither we nor the cachalots are going to be satisfied with short commons. Though professors be virtuous there shall still be cakes and ale in the world. We shall have our monsters—our krakens and sea-serpents—let them bite their thumbs at them as they will. The Prince of Monte Carlo, too, not many years ago, found one for himself, and his naturalist called it Lepidotenthis Grimaldii. With a Latin name and a naturalist, there can surely be no more objection.